


anyway, here's wonderwall

by encroix



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:14:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26668048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/encroix/pseuds/encroix
Summary: Luke likes to talk about his musical influences. Julie teaches him a new one. They both learn some things.
Relationships: Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Comments: 32
Kudos: 432





	anyway, here's wonderwall

**Author's Note:**

> Given the timeline of the show, I assume that Luke died before the release of _What's the Story Morning Glory_ (which came out Oct. 1995), and has never heard Wonderwall. That was the single generating idea for this lmao.
> 
> Also, they flirt a bunch because it's what they deserve.

Luke doesn’t like to think of himself as a music snob, but he kind of is. Not in a bad way, Julie thinks, but in the way where you know so much and expect everyone else to know what you’re talking about too. Alex and Reggie roll their eyes at him sometimes when they’re workshopping a new song and listening to him tinker with the same three lines for hours. _When he gets like this, there’s nothing you can do but wait,_ Alex sighs. Reggie usually goes to the kitchen then, just hovering in front of the open fridge door to peer inside since he can’t fix himself anything or eat it anymore.

Since she started writing with him, Julie can tell when he’s headed down one of those mental roads that ends with him staring at her while he figures out how it is she can’t know who he’s talking about. ( _There were a lot of white guy rock bands, okay? And they all sound the same._

When she says that, he looks at her like she’s kicked a puppy.)

“You’ve never thought about it?” he asks her one night. “What you wanted your sound to be?”

Julie tries to think, but all she can remember is wanting to be like her mother, is the soundtrack of her childhood playing out from their open kitchen windows or the open garage door. She remembers Ella Fitzgerald and smooth R&B, Whitney’s crisp runs between notes, her parents dancing to merengue and salsa while she and Carlos played and fought on the living room floor. She never thought of her sound as anything beyond her and the comfort of her home, something that felt easy and lived in. But she’s been a singer first. Her mom was the songwriter—not her.

Maybe that’s starting to change now, because of the boys, sure, but also because she doesn’t know what it’s like to have music without her mom. It didn’t make sense to have one without the other, and trying to figure out how to do it now feels like trying to learn how to walk again. Every chord, every bridge, every melody makes her think of her mom elbowing beside her at the piano, grinning at her while she sang.

“No,” she tells him, with a shrug. “I guess I never thought about it that much.”

Luke nods once, clicking his tongue. “Well,” he says, “I guess that means we have a lot of work to do.”

She blinks at him. “What?” she says. “What? Work? Like… like, homework?”

He grins.

“No,” she says. “Nope. No way.”

  
Whatever their connection is, she knows music has something to do with it. Sometimes she wonders if that isn’t all it is, the way that music has touched their lives, the things that they’ve lost to it. But then sometimes he looks at her in a certain slant of light, his head tilted, and she thinks that music is the last thing she’s thinking about at all.

But it—they, the boys—came to save her when she needed them the most, when she needed to find her love for music again, for living again, or risk losing it. 

It was what Luke chose above his own family, above his own life.

Maybe that’s why it matters so much to him, she wonders. How they sound and how the band does, and getting back his legacy from whatever Bobby or Trevor or whatever his name is did to it. Julie knows that things in the music industry don’t go according to plan, that people can lie, cheat, and steal the things that matter to you right from under your nose. But she also knows that there isn’t anything else in the world that makes her feel this way, that when Alex’s kick drum beat gets going so hard she can feel the vibrations rattling through her chest, it’s the closest thing she’s felt to flying. 

So she lets him talk to her about the bands that he loves, about how he and Reggie and Alex used to scope out the LA club scene and just soak in the sounds, the scene, of everything that they wanted to be. She doesn’t know much about the punk scene (it’s too much black and too much noise for her), but what they played for her sounds miles away from it.

So when he picks up his guitar and starts finger picking his way through a song she’s never heard before, she takes a seat on the edge of the coffee table and listens. 

“I mean,” she says, “I know _Nirvana_.”

“We’ve got to get you to the record store,” he says, from the couch in her mom’s studio, tuning his guitar. “I mean, we just can’t let things like this stand.”

She arches a brow and shakes her head. “The record store?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Place you go to buy music, listen to it, talk about it, live it and breathe it?”

Reggie rolls his eyes. “Dude, you never even bought a record. You just hijacked the listening booth for hours until Danny kicked you out.”

Luke throws him the finger.

“Mature, guys,” Alex crows from the loft. “Real mature.”

She reaches for her phone and clicks through to Spotify. “We don’t need to go anywhere,” she says, waving her phone.

The boys all shoot her a look of distaste.

“It doesn’t sound the same, Jules,” Luke says, and the boys let out whistles.

Alex poofs down from the loft as Reggie starts jumping up and down. “ _Jules_?” they crow. “ _Juuuuuules_?”

She’s lucky they’re too busy looking at Luke to see how much her cheeks color.

Luke punches Reggie in the arm. “Shut up,” he says. “And you know you agree with me.”

“No,” Julie says, “It’s got like hi-fi or something—low compression—the guys at school talk about it sometimes.”

“But you can hear everything on vinyl,” Luke argues. “It’s like you’re there in the room.”

She taps into the search. “The closest record store is like twenty minutes away, it’s late, and it’s full of weird guys in there anyway. What do you want to listen to?”

They run through a hit list of Luke’s most important influences (that’s what he actually says, _influences_ , like he’s giving a _Rolling Stone_ interview) with a few names she’s heard before and a bunch she hasn’t: Talking Heads, The Clash, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Big Drill Car. Some of it is less music to her than noise, stirring up the start of a headache behind her eyes, but she sits through it while Luke and the boys bounce around on their toes, jumping off of the furniture, playing along on their instruments.

She laughs in spite of herself. They’re so full of life, her boys, running and dancing and laughing as they goof off, and she can feel for a second what their vision for the rest of their lives would have been like.

(But if they hadn’t died, they wouldn’t be here and she never would have been able to meet them and that’s something she doesn’t ever want to think about.)

  
Luke catches her listening to Trevor’s music one night when she’s up late studying for a music theory test that she isn’t at all ready for. He poofs into her room without knocking, and she’s halfway to rolling her eyes and reminding him about boundaries again when he taps the top of his wrist. She rubs at her eyes and glances at the computer screen. 

“All right,” she says. “But this is one exception. No poofing into my room whenever you feel like it.”

He flashes a grin at her and something warm unspools in her chest.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she says.

He flops down onto her bed and squints at the screen. “Your light was on.”

“You’re keeping tabs on me?”

“You’re usually asleep by now,” he says. “The boys were worried.”

She runs a hand through her hair and shoots him a look. But he doesn’t respond, his attention fixed to the notes on her computer. 

“You want some help?”

“You know anything about music theory?”

“I’m a songwriter, Jules,” he says. “I don’t know shit.”

She laughs, and when he looks back up at her, he’s smiling back. There’s a not-small part of her that loves how natural this feels, him hanging out in her room, their back and forth. Even when he makes her nervous, he doesn’t really make her nervous. It’s everything else that makes her nervous. The thought of what could happen to him, of what they might want to happen, of the future. Scarier than the test she’s about to fail.

“I’m sure you’re going to do fine,” he says.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve had to take a test,” she says. 

He tilts his head. “Yeah,” he says. "Now that you bring it up."

“I don’t know anything about diatonic scales.”

He reaches for the keys and taps a few times, and the song starts playing again. He pushes himself back to sitting up, and she rushes towards the computer, fussing to switch it off.

“No,” he says. “It’s okay.”

She bites her lip. “Listen, I know that there’s…that you’re still dealing with a lot of stuff. I just…”

“It’s how you know it,” he says. “I know.”

“It’s weird knowing that you wrote it, though.”

He takes the edge of the laptop and turns it back towards him, tapping the space bar. She sits down next to him and they let it play through once, neither of them talking. He closes his eyes, his hands resting against his knees, and she wishes she could say something, do something, anything, to help. 

She wishes she could tell him that it feels like his early songs belong to both of them somehow, that they helped her to be the musician that she is even though they were his work, his writing.

But there's no taking away what Bobby/Trevor did to him, and there's nothing she can say to make that better either.

“What’s your favorite line in the song?” he says.

“ _Don’t you want to see that blue light shining/Just one more time/Never leaving us behind_ ,” she sings.

He leans back against her pillows, a small smile rising on his face. “You should do that live,” he says. “We’ll put it as one of your cover songs.”

“One of your songs?”

“It sounds good on you,” he says.

She grins then, warm and giddy with butterflies that feel less like anxiety over the test that she’s about to fail and more like joy that she’s managed to give him something back. 

“I like it when you smile,” he says.

“No,” she says, rising from the bed and putting distance between them.

He wrinkles his brow. “What?”

“You can’t say things like that this late,” she says. 

He crosses his legs at the ankle. “And why not?”

She laughs. “Because it’s not allowed. House rules. My house, my rules.”

He gives a mock salute. “So I can’t say that your smile always makes me want to smile? And that when you sing, I always get goosebumps? And that I love seeing you in your huge slippers with your hair like this?” 

He’s standing and heading towards her before she knows what’s happening, and then they’re just in the middle of her room, so still and looking at one another. Her body is buzzing with how close he is, her notes fluttering in a sheaf of paper down by her feet. Even with the oversized sweater she has on, she feels a sudden chill.

His fingers graze the sweater at her elbows and then come down to catch against her fingers.

“What are you doing?” she asks. This is not helping her focus.

“You’re going to do a great job tomorrow,” he says, taking her hands in his. “You have to relax. Stop worrying about it. It’s going to come together. You’re a great singer and musician, and you got this.”

She shifts her weight and leans towards him, and he takes it as invitation to wrap his arms around her. Her head settles against his shoulder and she breathes him in, and it’s just…Luke. His warmth, the smell of his soap and the faint dusty smell of his old clothes, and his mouth hovering against the crown of her head.

He squeezes her gently, arms tightening against her back, and she lets out a sigh she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“You got this,” he says. “Trust me.”

She pulls back and looks at him, and his eyes are the most gold she’s ever seen them. “You really think I can do this?”

“I think you can do anything.”

He squeezes her arms, and she glances at his mouth—but only once.

  
(The test goes surprisingly okay. It’s a C+ so not her best, but not her worst either. She gets the chromatic scales, and calls it a win.)

  
He’s waiting for her in the studio when she gets back from school that day. She tosses off her backpack and collapses into the sofa beside him, listening to him run through simple riffs and chords on the six-string. It’s nice, the acoustic sound of it, even if it does just sound like he’s tuning. 

“It’s too quiet in here,” she says.

“Alex is out on the Boulevard again,” he says. “And Reggie went to go watch how Carlos and your dad are making those sandwiches.”

She huffs a stray curl of hair out of her eyes. “He can’t even eat them,” she says.

Luke shrugs. “He really likes hanging out with them,” he says. “Your family.”

She can hear the yearning in his voice when he mentions it, and she gives a soft smile. "I'm happy to lend them out," she says. "Especially when Carlos is being annoying."

“How did it go?”

She kicks at the coffee table and glances towards the backpack. “Not too shabby,” she says. “Passing.”

“See?” Luke crows. “That’s what the Luke Patterson School of Music gets you.”

“The Luke Patterson School of Music?” she repeats, laughing.

“I could probably start up franchises or something,” he says.

“I don’t even remember half the stuff you play for me.”

“That just means that I have to play it for you more.”

She groans. “Please,” she says. “No more. No more screaming. I like it when people sing. Like, melodies. With notes.”

He sets a hand dramatically against his heart. “You hurt me, Jules.”

“Besides,” she says. “I think it’s time for you to enter the Julie Molina School of Music instead. A lot’s happened since 1995, you know.”

“Yeah?” he says, and she inches closer to him on the sofa until they’re nearly shoulder to shoulder. She wants to lean her weight into him, to feel how solid he is against her, to feel how warm he is. “Like what?”

“Well,” she chirps, too brightly, “You missed the boy bands and _Britney_ , Taylor, Fall Out Boy, _Mr. Brightside_.”

He scoffs. “What are those band names?”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” she says. 

He hands her his guitar by the neck. “You want to play me something?”

She shoots him a look. “I know you’ve heard me practicing guitar,” she says.

He laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “What you need is _more_ , not less.”

“I only know one song on guitar,” she says, “that you could call a song. So you’re really doing this to yourself.”

He leans back against the sofa, his arm resting on the back close enough to be resting against her shoulders. “Go for it,” he says.

She runs her fingers over the strings once, fixing her fingers on the right frets, and strums a chord. 

“Nice,” he says.

“Shut up.”

It takes her a minute to figure out what she’s doing, but by the time she finds the flow of the song, her fingers have remembered what they’re supposed to do. She’s slowed it down, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s just watching her and listening as she sings.

“ _And all the roads we have to walk are winding, and all the lights that lead us there are blinding_ ,” she sings.

She’s never seen him so still before, but he doesn’t shift his attention, doesn’t do more than keep the beat with the tap of his foot against the floor.

“ _There are many things that I would like to say to you_ ,” she sings, “ _…but I don’t know how…_ ” 

She catches his glance, but he doesn’t look away like he usually does. There’s something thick in the air between them now, like the rest of the world has faded away and it’s just the shell of the song guarding the two of them against anything that might intrude. Her fingers tingle as she shifts from chord to chord, but somehow she can still find the notes and her voice keeps steady.

“ _Because maybe, you’re going to be the one that saves me_ ,” she sings, “ _And after all, you’re my wonderwall…_ ”

She gives another few strums before she stops, her palm clapping down against the strings.

“Jules,” he says. "Wow."

"You don't know it?" she says.

He shakes his head.

"It's, um, _Wonderwall._ It's like the easiest song you can learn," she says. “They’re a rock band. Or they were, I guess. From England.”

“Hey,” he says, setting his hand on top of hers for a moment. “That was incredible.”

“Thanks,” she says, ducking her head. Her hair slides in front of her shoulders, and she takes a second to calm down. She doesn’t know why she’s nervous. She’s performed in front of him dozens of times, and it’s never quite felt like this before.

She hands him back the guitar in silence, and they sit there another beat, just watching each other. She should say something, she thinks, except there’s nothing that her brain can come up with. Part of her wants to run back inside her house and pretend that it didn’t quite happen.

“You should play more often,” he says.

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

“No, I mean it,” he says. “Here, show me those chords again?”

He grips the neck with his left hand, shifting forward on the couch until he’s perched on the edge. She leans in behind him, her chin bumping against his shoulder as she adjusts his fingers one by one. “Here,” she whispers, repositioning his fingers, “Like this.”

Her body hums with electricity as he turns to look at her, his eyes scanning her face.

“What are the chords?” he says.

“Start at E minor, then to the G, the D, and the A,” she says. 

He nods his head at her. “You’ll sing?”

Before she has time to answer, he’s already playing. “ _Today was going to be the day, but they’ll never throw it back to you…_ ”

  
The next time they write together, he runs through the chords once on his guitar with a quick smile at her.

“What is that?” Reggie asks, pointing between the two of them.

Luke shrugs. “Just warming up.”

“You never warm up,” Alex says. “No matter how many times I’ve told you that a good warm-up…”

“Stop it, you guys,” she says. “I think I have the bones of a new song that could be really good.” She reaches inside her backpack and rummages for the scrap of paper buried underneath all of her binders.

She unfolds it on the piano, smoothing it out with her hand.

“It’s called Six-String Serenade.”

Alex nods towards her. “How does it go?”

She lifts the fallboard of the piano, and takes a seat, striking the opening chord. “I don’t have the verses yet,” she says, “But from the intro to the pre-chorus and chorus…”

She plays the intro, an understated delicate piano, as the boys all gather around, listening to what she’s put together.

She taps through a repeating chord, nodding at them about the verse that doesn’t exist yet, before leading into the lift of the pre-chorus.

“ _And I’ve been sitting and thinking/About these games that we’re playing/And I don’t know where to start/With all these things we’re not saying/About what’s in our hearts,_ ” she sings. Her fingers jolt down on the piano keys in quick succession, hard thrumming notes that drive the rhythm.

“Ooh, drum,” Alex says. “ _Bum bum bum_ , right there. Maybe some hi-hat. _Tsch, tsch, tsch_.”

Julie nods. “ _But what I can’t say/is in my six-string serenade/My six-string serenade/For all the good times/And all the secrets/And those things that we can’t fight…_ ” Her voice rises, thickening to a belt. “ _The way you know me/The way I see you/The shadows coming into the light…_ ” 

She drops back down an octave, her fingers trailing down the scale until they resettle in the chord for the start of the second verse.

Luke plugs in his guitar and gives the amp a kick before playing an answering riff.

“What do you think?” she says, darting from the piano towards his side of the studio.

“I think you’re an amazing songwriter,” he says.

Her tongue peeks out from beneath her teeth when she smiles. “Well,” she says. “It’s really inspired by this band, Sunset Curve? I don’t think you know them.”

“Major influence?” he says, bumping her side gently. 

“Oh yeah,” she laughs, and his smile is too wide and too bright and maybe they’re not fooling anybody. “ _Major_.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know nothing about music theory or guitars or pianos. Everything I got, I got from the Internet. Please don't fact-check me on any of it. If diatonic triads/scales are actually a super easy concept, let's just pretend that it's not.
> 
> Besides the titular reference, I adapted/stole some lyrics from Mazzy Star's _Blue Light_ and the title from _Five String Serenade_. The end song lyrics (Julie's song) are all me; have at 'em if you actually write music. (I do not.)
> 
> Given the timing of the series, it is my headcanon and sincere, steadfast belief that Sunset Curve comes out of the '90s LA punk scene, so that's where the majority of the band references are coming from. As someone who is not super knowledgeable about the '90s LA punk scene, I got some of these references from Wikipedia.


End file.
